“Maid’s Day Off”: Leisured Domesticity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (4) ◽  
pp. 1316-1331
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Household Labor ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Home Based ◽  
American Model ◽  
Jewish Americans ◽  
Domestic Roles ◽  
Family Centered

Abstract At the height of the mid-twentieth-century domestic revival, middle-class Jewish women created forms of “leisured domesticity,” marked by temporary female-only recreational spaces in their family-centered arenas. In contrast to other forms of recreation, with mahjong second-generation Jewish women gained an entitlement to peer-oriented leisure in the site of domestic labor: the home. Based on extensive oral histories, Heinz argues that consistent cultural patterns emerged around mahjong. These commonalities created a widespread culture that reached its height in the postwar years of upward mobility, experienced in particularly pronounced ways by Jewish Americans. Although the culture of mahjong could reinforce women’s domestic roles as much as undermine them, the weekly mahjong ritual demanded a temporary reallocation of household labor. Understandings of postwar life have largely been shaped by a duality between what defined an idealized domesticity in theory (devoted mothers in family-centered middle-class homes) and the ways that women resisted or were excluded from these norms. In contrast, the practices of leisured domesticity illuminate a multidimensional reality. Mahjong-playing mothers neither overthrew nor fully acquiesced to the powerful norms of postwar American “model” domesticity. Creating a widely accepted rhythm of women’s recreation made domesticity more livable by carving out patterns of leisure within it.

The Paradoxes of Postwar Domesticity

Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 203-220
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Household Labor ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Home Life ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Domestic Roles ◽  
Jewish Mother

At the height of the postwar domestic revival, a subset of women who fully participated in the culture of domesticity nonetheless claimed a unique space for leisure with their peers in the form of a weekly evening mahjong game. Although the culture of mahjong could reinforce their domestic roles as much as undermine them, the weekly mahjong ritual explicitly came at the expense of both household labor and their family members’ comfort. Despite their claims on autonomous domestic leisure, mahjong-playing middle-class women became emblematic of the trappings of stereotypical postwar domesticity. As Jewish mahjong players established their strong cultural norms in the 1950s and 1960s, they became embedded in the evolving stereotype of the domineering Jewish mother. This association signaled the waning of both postwar domestic norms and the patterns of leisured domesticity that thrived within them, as economic changes and generational shifts transformed middle-class home life.

The Politics of Memory: Rededicating Two Historical Monuments in Postwar Germany

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Sam A. Mustafa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Coffee Table

For much of the past two centuries German governments encouraged or even sponsored the construction of war monuments. By the turn of the twentieth century Germany was covered in more than a thousand such shrines, most of which had local or regional significance as places of annual celebration or commemoration. Government, media, and business all contributed to an elaborate hagiography of Germany's battles, war heroes, and martyrs, with monuments usually serving as the centerpieces. Millions of middle-class Germans attended or participated in commemoration ceremonies at war monuments all over the country, and/or filled their homes with souvenir trinkets, tableware, wall decorations, coffee-table books, and other quotidian items that reproduced images of the monuments or scenes from the events they memorialized.

Reframing Solidarity: Company Magazine as Family Album

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-67
Author(s):  
Courtney Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Union Membership ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Concomitant Reduction ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The U.S

We are witnessing a time of shrinking labor unions across the globe. Among member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rates of union membership have declined from 30% in 1985 to 20% today (McCarthy 2017). In the U.S., the current rate is just 10.7% (Yadoo 2018). We have seen along with this the concomitant reduction in working-class and middle-class standards of living. Technological, political, and economic factors have impacted this change, but there is a cultural dimension to it as well. From the moment industrial unions in the U.S. gained power, corporations began to counter workingclass solidarity with alternative narratives that emphasized individualism, domesticity, and leisure. This article illuminates such efforts with a reading of one particularly sophisticated example from the mid-twentieth century, in which a steel corporation’s company magazine used workers’ own participation and self-representations in an effort to reorient notions of solidarity toward an identification with the corporation as family.

scholarly journals A Place Called Supermarket

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The City

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.

Beckett's Present Moments

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
Rodney Sharkey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
European Society ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

As a comfortable middle-class Protestant in Southern Ireland, Beckett was well placed to live the life of what Badiou ironically refers to as ‘the deserving body’ (59). However, Beckett moved beyond such home comforts to witness at close hand some of the most disruptive moments of twentieth century European history. This essay proposes that his work is both a manifestation of that history and a complex response to it in its content, and, particularly, in its form. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodore Adorno proposes that ‘the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’ (7). Exemplifying Adorno's proposition that ‘aesthetic form is sedimented context’ (9) Beckett's work remains disruptive of Western late capital commodification through the restatement of historical antagonisms that involve characters having to choose between privilege and impoverishment, quietism and protest, and being and its obliteration. The result is a body of work that continues to present, for its readers’ consideration, the parameters of a politics of choice which are repeatedly instantiated by the traces of the tumultuous history the work carries within itself. As the decisions facing Beckett's characters reflected those faced by late twentieth century European society, so too his work now resonates in the present moment as the contemporary world struggles in the shadow of neo-liberal capitalism and COVID-19.

Flower Empowerment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Stalker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
Upper Middle Class

Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, was first systematized in the fifteenth century, when it was limited to elite male practitioners. It was first widely practiced by women in the early twentieth century, but did not reach mass popularity until the 1950s and 1960s, with an estimated ten million students, over 99 percent of whom were female. While it was still considered by many to be a domestic skill for upper-middle-class housewives, it increasingly offered employment for postwar Japanese women as teachers and even as headmasters (iemoto) of their own schools, allowing women to engage in paid labor without violating traditional gender norms. This chapter traces the trajectory of job opportunities for women in ikebana, examining how educational reforms in the Meiji and postwar periods provided chances to study and obtain teaching licenses in ikebana and how the three largest schools—Ikenobo, Ohara, and Sogetsu—increasingly professionalized their corps of teachers.

Not a Fanatic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Control ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

One of the more difficult aspects of middle-class respectability has been getting it right when it comes to displays of emotion—too little and a person seems stoical, indifferent, cold; too much and a person is likely to be accused of wearing their feelings on their sleeve, incapable of self-control, being dangerous, overzealous, a fanatic. Religion is a particularly interesting context in which to consider the display of emotion. This chapter examines how accusations of zealotry populated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of American religion. Zealotry was a contested idea that religious leaders, public officials, scholars, and the popular press discussed repeatedly. It was good, many commentators argued, for Americans to be zealous. But it was not good to be labeled a zealot. Zealots were led too much by their emotions. They were easily confused, frequently irrational, and sometimes dangerous.

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

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